Kill your blog: Why side projects are the future of marketing
blog.crew.co
blog.crew.co
All our blog posts failed to gather eyeballs. We tried on our blog (https://missiveapp.com/blog) and on Medium (https://medium.com/@plehoux).
We are probably not good at writing compelling and viral content. It's hard. It's a unique and rare talent. You need to write about subjects that matter to people, subjects of our time.
To me, 37 signals (https://m.signalvnoise.com) are the master of this game.
I don't think blog post are dead; it's just harder to get noticed. But isn't it the same for everything else.
I enjoyed the blog post and did, in fact, learned about the crew product. :)
It's a kind of problem that should be solved by social norms and regulations. They are way too lenient right now, and the continued acceptance of advertising as a respectable occupation perplexes me.
In marketing there are these all the time. A company I worked for had this "style test" which new customers completed, and we suggested them a "personalised, designer-curated" items list via mail. It was not even ML, we splat them into three profiles based on the test, and made three different mails, sent each of them to the members respective profile. Each mail started with a title like "Your personalised style guide, tailored for you by our designers"... It's not a big blatant lie like saying "USA is a democracy", but still, it's a lie.
The problem is there's only so much work that can be done in that area, and way more marketing agencies than quality work. The excess labor bleeds into mercenary work where advertising companies shill for whoever pays them, regardless of merit or ethics.
Marketing helps products that would succeed anyway based on merit succeed faster and harder, and also helps unseat incumbents who have inertia but a bad product. It also allows products that should by every right sink like a lead balloon lurch haphazardly above the waterline, leaving behind a wake of cheated customers.
Oh, if only we could trust people in marketing to refuse help to the latter.
Reading this gave me a bit of a chuckle, because this is exactly how bad advice spreads too. Like bonsai kitten. At the end of the article, all I could think about was how the post was basically talking about "diversification" without ever using the term outright, even though it's a more suitable concept to employ than "side projects" IMO.
How is this lying to people?
In this searchable world, ads don't need to be pushed continuously because if the ad suits me, I will find it.
As such less effort needs to go into the "ad delivery network" and more into the quality and specificity of the ad itself
Which used to be a blog post, but now seems to be a useful online tool or project.
The ads get more expensive and more targeted, the distribution channel slims down to search.
This comment seems at home on the Brendan Eich thread next door too.
Blog posts can be valuable (by educating or entertaining, for example), but writing valuable blog posts is a lot of effort.
Side projects can be valuable, but creating valuable side projects is effort.
So I guess it depends on what you're good at. A side project is usually something you're passionate about, so it's a good starting point. But if you like writing, blogging is still the way to go.
That said, I did click on one and while howmuchtomakeanapp seemed cool, the site was so slow that i closed it after two questions.